This Cosmos reboot just keeps getting better and better. This last episode was all about gravity, light, and William Herschel. Herschel, like Halley from last week, made incredible contributions to science, only to have most of them ignored. Yes, discovering Uranus was very important, but his work with binary star systems was inspired. Herschel was not the first to observe binaries, and as last night's episode revealed, his contemporary John Michell theorized their mechanics first, but Herschel's work would prove the most fruitful. I really enjoyed the animated segments with Herschel and his son, it was interesting.
Last night's episode also recreated a segment from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and one of Einstein's classic thought experiments on the nature of light. Time dilation and the nature of light while moving at relativistic speeds is always fascinating to hear about, and while it may not be possible to really understand it, I think Tyson made it easy for people to at least wrap their mind around the idea.
The best part of the episode was the black holes. From the animation of Herschel talking about dark stars to the black hole dive with callbacks to 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was an intense and enlightening segment. Sure, it was all theory crafting because we have no idea what happens within a black hole, but this is the ship of the imagination. And if we do ever figure black holes out, the truth will always be stranger than what we can possibly imagine. From the black hole, we went straight to the most poignant part, where Tyson talked about John Herschel, and how photography is a sort of time travel. A great episode, from start to finish.
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